"You must be figuring on making money, real money," Rob teased.
Harry could not tell him how the slow raising of that house had lifted her to the sight of still wider horizons. But every board she helped to lay in place, every nail she drove fastened her more firmly to this new land, strengthened her will to succeed. As she and Rob worked they talked, planning endless improvements to be made as they should prosper. The desire for those things stirred them to toil happier than many pleasures.
Rob did not finish the house, there was too much else to be done; a horse shed to be run up, firewood to be cut and hauled in readiness for the following spring, the channel of the stream that ran close to the house to be deepened and widened with the slip, so that when the snow water came down in the spring break-up it would not overflow into their new cellar, or swirl a pile of stones from the hillside into the garden.
They left the gathering of the stove wood to the last; freezing ground would not make sagebrush any harder to cut and haul. They were getting the wood in a coulee about a mile east of Harry's hundred and sixty where there were plenty of willows and the sagebrush grew big and thick.
It was a cold November afternoon when, as they were loading the last wagonful, they saw coming in along the trail a team hauling lumber and a mountain wagon.
"Well! What do you know about that," Rob exclaimed; "looks like some one's filed here. I'd better go over and see."
Harry watched in a stir of eager curiosity. Homesteaders! That would mean neighbors. A procession of possibilities swept through her mind.
The three men talked for five minutes or so, then Rob came back.
"Homesteaders all right," he announced, "an old man named Eldredge and his wife. The young fellow is a real estate man from Shoshone who's locating them. Eldredge is only going to put up his shack this fall and then go back east—he's from Missouri—and came out in the spring with his wife."
"How jolly to have neighbors," Harry beamed. "I hope they've some children?"